NVIDIA Doubles Down On Self-Driving Cars With Xavier AI Chip And A Hat Tip To Next Gen Volta GPU

NVIDIA may be in the hearts and minds of gamers these days, with the successful launch of the company’s new Pascal-based GeForce 10 series graphics cards, but at their GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Amsterdam today the company just gave the autonomous vehicle industry a reason to sit up and take notice as well. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled what he called the “greatest SoC endeavor he has ever known.” Announcing the company’s new Xavier System On Chip (SoC), Huang showcased what the company claims to be an “AI Supercomputer” for the future of autonomous vehicles. Built with an 8-core ARM64-based CPU and a
next generation 512 core NVIDIA GPU, Xavier is targeted to supplant the company’s current Drive PX 2 platform in about a quarter of its power envelope.

While NVIDIA notes Drive PX 2 delivers 24 DL TOPS (Deep Learning Tera-Ops) of compute performance, Xavier packs 20 DL TOPS of compute performance or a little over 80 percent of the Drive PX 2’s computational throughput. However, comprised of some 7 billion transistors and built on 16nm FinFET process technology, a single Xavier chip delivers this level of performance whereas Drive PX 2 requires dual mobile NVIDIA Tegra processors and dual NVIDIA Pascal GPUs. Xavier gets it done on a single chip, and again at massive power savings in a 20 Watt TDP (Drive PX 2 Thermal Design Power is 80 Watts).

Also, what may pique the interest of gamers, as well as self-driving car platform engineers, is that Xavier’s GPU engine, a burly 512-core beast, is based on NVIDIA’s next gen Volta GPU architecture. Reportedly, Volta is capable of 8K
HDR video encode and decode in hardware (versus 4K in Drive PX 2) and offers a level of machine vision and learning on the fly that is critical to maintain automotive safety standards and allows self-driving cars to learn and react to their surroundings much faster and more efficiently.

NVIDIA’s Drive PX 2 platform, and eventually systems built on Xavier, are AI-driven supercomputers of sorts on wheels. The platform is connected to a system of cameras that continually monitors the road and its surroundings. From traffic lights and signs to more complex scenarios, like a partially obfuscated pedestrian standing behind a mailbox, these systems will continually learn through image and pattern recognition, all the while uploading what they have learned to a neural network of NVIDIA-powered autonomous vehicle systems all over the world. In this way, each individual NVIDIA Drive system will have the wisdom of the neural network, and what it has learned, behind the wheel of the car at all times.